Friday, December 19, 2014

How do We Know?

When we come to faith in God, our response is to witness to
God, to help others know the God we have come to know. And yet, God is so
transcendent, so other and yet so near, that
we can never wrap our minds completely around this mystery.

We often get stuck in
post-Enlightenment thinking that lifts up analysis, descriptions, and theories
as the best or only ways of knowing. It’s head knowledge.

But you know as well as
I do that there are lots of other ways of knowing things, ways that come
through our spirit, our gut, or our intuition. Limiting our ways of knowing to
our heads downplays what we might learn in other ways.

We are minds, to be
sure, but we’re also bodies. At this time of year, when we celebrate God’s
incarnation, when God consented to life in a body, it’s worthwhile to see how
our bodies might teach us.

Bodies have ways of
knowing that are different from and yet intimately connected with the mind’s
ways of knowing. Some neurobiologists hypothesize that we automatically, almost
reflexively, confront an unknown stimulus with the question “What is it?” If we
think of God as the ultimate first, we can understand our constant questioning,
trying to understand “what is it?”

Even as our minds are constantly trying to know the world,
the primary way we have to do this is through our bodies. While Enlightenment
thinking would tell us that we can use “pure” reason, realistically we know
that everything we consider with our minds passes through the filter of our
bodies.

The ancient church had a saying for this - lex
orandi, lex credenda – which
just means that what the people do truly reflects what the people believe. If
we say we believe in serving the poor, clothing the naked, and feeding the
hungry, yet do nothing toward these beliefs, you can be pretty sure we don’t
really believe those things.

One intentional way we teach ourselves through our bodies in
through ritual. Theologian Theodore Jennings writes that “ritual action is a
means by which its we discover who we are in the world and ‘how it is’ with the
world.” Or, to put it more simply, the way we
learn to do things is by doing them.

Sounds ridiculously
simple, right? But consider learning to ride a bicycle. If I were to say to someone,
“Here is a bicycle. There are two wheels, which are attached to a metal frame.
The brakes stop the wheels by friction by either pads or discs and are
controlled by levers on the handlebars, which you hold with your hands. To ride
the bicycle, you sit on the seat and balance on the wheels. To move forward,
place both feet on the pedals and push them around in circles.”

This is only one silly
example of how many times people learn how to do things by doing them, rather
than by explanation or instruction. Jennings goes on to say that “the
performance of a ritual, teaches one not only how to conduct the ritual itself”
but also how to behave “outside the ritual space – in the world epitomized by
or founded or renewed in and through the ritual itself.”

To put it another way, just as a bicycle teaches us how to
ride it, the bread and cup at the Lord’s Table teach us how to be fed and share
with one another. In baptism, we gently, carefully use water to symbolically
wash a body, knowing that there’s also a soul being renewed. It’s simple, but
indescribably beautiful.

We can be transformed by the rituals we follow. The hope of
all of our Christian rituals is that the way we are in worship – loving, kind,
patient, attentive, joyful – might become the way we are in the world. In
worship, we practice being a citizen of the Kingdom of God so that we can carry
our passport into the world, re-presenting God to all we meet.

Christmas Eve is a rich time for ritual. When I was a child,
we baked cookies and put the best ones out for Santa Claus with a big glass of
milk. When I became a Christian, I added the ritual of worship – hearing the
story of the Christ child in the manger, sharing communion, and lighting
candles. If you want to know God, consider joining us at the Krum Church at
7pm. There’s always a place for you at God’s house!